i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

I bought the Criterion DVD edition of this film, having been an admirer of Louis Malle for a long time, and having heard that this was one of his very best films. I thought that if it was as good as Pretty Baby, Atlantic City, Damage, Vanya on 42nd Street - I could go on - then it would be worth waiting for (not to mention the high price).Well, it's not. I didn't like the way the film began, and although I kept expecting it to click into gear and improve, it never did.The rather anarchic household was tedious and not nearly as funny as it was no doubt intended to be; but that's not the real problem.The boorish elder brothers deserve a slap in the chops; but they're not the real problem either.The three brothers' obsession with sex is overdone, though not greatly so if I remember my own adolescence correctly; that's not the real problem either.And neither is the relentless "free-spiritedness" of the intensely irritating mother, although it certainly doesn't help the film.No, the real problem is the supposed resolution of what passes for a plot. Mother gets drunk, son undresses her, falls into bed with her and passion overwhelms them. Yeah, right. And then mother sobers up enough to have some deep and meaningful words with son about remembering and cherishing their secret moment of passion. And son says of course. Yeah, right.And then son slips out of bed, tiptoes down the hall, tries (but fails, in the one faintly believable scene in this ridiculous sequence) to rape one of the two sympathetic characters in the whole film (the other being the nice prostitute at the brothel), and moves on to spend the night with another girl, a willing one this time. As if.And finally, when he creeps back to his own room the next morning and finds his father and brothers there, fully clothed while his mother's still in just a dressing-gown, the film ends with everybody laughing.I've got nothing against sex, nothing against nudity, I love French films and I respect and admire Louis Malle. But this film misses the mark completely. As a comedy it is without a laugh in it from beginning to end. And the plot is so ridiculously unbelievable that if there's supposed to be some insight in the film, it is entirely lost.

This coming of age story about Laurent, an adolescent French boy, has only one unique twist and that is a single act of incest, and that develops in such a natural and harmless way that it is just one more life experience in Laurent's maturation - in fact it unleashes in him the confidence to pursue a girl his own age.Most clichés about Western teenagers are here: smoking, drinking, prostitutes, masturbation, comparing penis sizes, reading pornographic books, petty theft, fascination with women's clothing, roughhousing, practical jokes, and so forth. And a pedophile priest is thrown in for good measure. The movie is well filmed and not without charm and it may have been groundbreaking at the time, but it seems rather timeworn some thirty-six years on.I found the behavior of Laurent and his two brothers bothersome. They treated their domestic help rather brutishly and in all respects gave evidence of behaving like the spoiled, inconsiderate rich kids they were. Take for example the scene at the table where they were playing "tennis" with the spinach.The movie takes place shortly after the defeat of France at Dien Bien Phu and France's withdrawal from Vietnam. One thinks that the background references to these events portend some plot theme later on, but nothing ever comes of it outside setting the time period.Then there is the illness referred to in the title. The official diagnosis was aortic insufficiency and dilation of the left ventricle. That sounds pretty serious to me, but after the diagnosis Laurent never seemed to suffer a single ill effect. Again a theme that is not subsequently developed.The young campers staging a version of Goethe's "The Erlking" was indeed a novelty - I wish there had been more such inventive, fun scenes. I somehow doubt that it would ever occur to a Boy Scout troop in the United States to undertake such a thing.The final scene of prolonged, forced laughter by all concerned seemed about as real as a laugh track and served to punctuate my opinion that this film does not belong among Malle's best.

I wonder what Freudians would think of the relationship between Laurent (Benoit Ferreux) and Clara Chevalier (Lea Massari), son and mother, who for half the film are basically on their own as the son gets treatment for a heart ailment. Maybe it's hard to think anything about this, or to put such an easy label as 'oedipal' on this whole psychological criss-cross. But what's hard to deny is how much liveliness is in possibly Louis Malle's best film (that I've seen yet at any rate). It's a tale of innocence lost, but then again in a family where it's not a high commodity anyway. Laurent is surrounded by older brothers who get him into parties with alcohol, and even to a brothel where he awkwardly loses his virginity. He also is a choirboy, does excellently in school, has an intellectual side that runs deep, and goes to confess his sins (from time to time) for the priest. But then there's something about his Mother, when he sees her get into a car he doesn't recognize or rides off with someone mysterious, that ignites his confused flame of first-hitting-puberty sexual jealousy. And it all leads up to Bastille day.Murmur of the Heart is not a picture really bent on anything with a solid plot, as it's more concerned with the kind of European 'character study' (not that there isn't a story there to look at it). I read Ebert's review and he mentioned that the picture is more about the mother than the son. I could see where that viewpoint comes from, but I have to think that it's more about both of them, and while I watched it (as opposed to now thinking about it once its ended) it seemed more concerned with the son and perpetually through his point of view. He doesn't totally understand why his mother feels the way she does, and why she runs off to her other man, torn between leaving her gynecologist husband for him. But Malle makes it seem torn between each side when Laurent is left at the hotel while Clara is away for two days. His confusion leads him into a kind of disarray that's been hinted at before, and its made all the more clear in the tension- very underneath their games and witty remarks- that builds up.But even with such an idea for the film, it is never really ugly or trashy. If anything, Malle does the best thing possible by making such a taboo subject realistic around the situation of family and the period. It's really wonderful seeing how Malle directs the smaller scenes, the bits that a director usually wouldn't bother with for emotional sake, or the little bits of dialog that do go on in the real world that don't necessarily have to do much with the rest of the story (one of those is when Laurent is getting washed down with a hose at the medical clinic, and the woman washing him goes on a long tangent of talk, not conversationally, just to hear herself talk). It could be tricky dealing with such mundane aspects of life such as brothers hanging out and goofing off, but there's layers of masculinity that get thrown in the mix (what are we to make of when the boys measure 'themselves' with a ruler, much to the angry housekeeper's dismay, or when Laurent tries out her mothers make-up I wondered).All the while Malle bases these characters in an entirely plausible environment and with a cast that works very well. Massari is almost TOO alluring a woman to be anyone's mother, least of which the headstrong and vulnerable Laurent, but this works to show what her frame of mind must be too, as she gets as much attention (in a different way of course) as Laurent does from the teenage girls. The actor playing Laurent is a first-timer here ala Leaud in 400 Blows, but I even got a Bresson feeling from him, of there being a lot of emotions buried underneath his usually calm and poised expression, the kind that can be felt even with just the slightest hints. He's perfect for the kind of kid who's still a bit much in his own desires and wants to see what may happen from all of this in the long term. But the psychological implications are left even more to chance by the ending, which is one of the best moments Malle has ever directed as the family all laughs together. Not to forget to mention another big plus, the film is filled with one of the best jazz soundtracks ever put together (including Parker, Bechet, Gillespie among others), and an exquisite use of period and very tasteful way about the more 'graphic' parts of the film. Murmur of the Heart shows in tragic-comic detail the sophistication and lewd sides of the French, and draws a lot to ponder about a boy's crossover in that rotten period of 14-15 years old and of a woman who has the same mixture of unstable emotions and child-like ideals of her own blood that pull the two into what happens. In totally unconventional terms, it's 'magnifique'. A+

Seven years before PRETTY BABY (1978), Malle directed another controversial film about the sexual awakening of a precocious teenager - in this case, a boy. As with the later film, Malle's elegant handling - suffused with feeling and humor, even irreverence - brings no portentous message and certainly no sensationalism to this theme (which culminates in an incestuous relationship between the boy and his attractive, middle-aged mother!). Even so, the complicity that goes on here between the boy and select members of his family seems to me to be wishful thinking on Malle's part (who also wrote the script) more than anything else: the boy's sexual initiation is organized by his promiscuous elder brothers and, apart from the mother-son "liaison" - which happens when she's intoxicated and is, in any case, shot in the dark and quite sensitively handled by all concerned - he's compliant of her various affairs, which actually brings him to confess to her that he never loved his father and consequently doubts his own parentage!The acting by the entire cast - veterans and newcomers alike - is wonderful; still, watching professionals like Lea Massari (in perhaps her most important role apart from the girl who goes missing in Antonioni's L¡¦AVVENTURA [1960]), Daniel Gelin (who has aged quite a bit from his 50s heyday!), Michel Lonsdale (as a potentially paedophile priest!) and Ave Ninchi (as the children's long-suffering, heavy-set Italian maid) is especially gratifying. The score by several jazz performers, including Charlie Parker, provides perfect accompaniment to the film.The only extra on the stand-alone Criterion release (it's also available as part of a 4-Disc Set with two other Malle films which revolve around children - LACOMBE LUCIEN [1974] and AU REVOIR, LES ENFANTS [1987]) - is the film's theatrical trailer which, amusingly, manages to incorporate in its publicity several of the most famous titles of the French New Wave!